How to Install Quake and Join a Server

Nobody plays Quake online with the executable id Software shipped in 1996, and the reason is a piece of software history that most games never had.

Quake came out, people played it over the internet, and it was terrible — every action waited for a round trip to the server before it happened, so on anything worse than a university connection you were aiming at where somebody had been. Later that year id released QuakeWorld, a free rewrite of the networking with client-side prediction in it, and online first-person shooters became possible. Not better. Possible.

Thirty years later, QuakeWorld is still the version people play, still through community-built clients, and the duel scene running on it is one of the oldest continuously active competitive communities in any game. Listings collect on the Quake hub here.

What you need, and the one genuine obstacle

Quake's content lives in two archive files in a folder called id1.

pak0.pak came from the shareware release, which id distributed freely and which anyone may still copy. pak1.pak contains the rest of the game and came with the registered version, which means you need to own Quake to have it legitimately.

That is the whole licensing situation and it is unusually clean. Buy Quake, and you have the data files. Every modern client is free and every one of them needs those two files pointed at it.

Quake sells on Steam and elsewhere, and the modern release comes with the original data along with a lot of convenience on top.Our Steam guide covers account creation, and securing it properly is worth the five minutes.

Setting it up

1. Buy Quake and install it. Find where the installation put its files. You are looking for the id1 folder and the two .pak files inside it — everything else is scaffolding.

1. Get a modern QuakeWorld client. The community standard is ezQuake, and the usual way people install it is through nQuake, which is a package that bundles a client together with configuration, sound and the map files that servers expect you to have. Installing the package rather than the bare client saves an evening of assembling parts.

1. Point the client at your data files. Every client needs pak0.pak and pak1.pak. Depending on the package, that means copying them into the client's own id1 folder or telling it where the Steam installation lives. The package's own instructions cover this and they are short.

1. Launch it and look at the settings once. Modern QuakeWorld clients expose a great deal — field of view, the way weapons are drawn, colours for players and teams, sound cues for pickups. The defaults are sensible. The one thing worth setting immediately is a comfortable field of view, because the 1996 default is narrow enough to cause genuine discomfort on a wide monitor.

1. Find a server and connect. The client has a browser built into it that queries the QuakeWorld master servers, and it also takes an address directly.

That is the entire process, and it is more involved than a modern game and less involved than most people expect from something this old.

Why a separate client at all

Because the community has spent thirty years improving the thing and nobody stopped them.

A modern QuakeWorld client is not a nostalgia wrapper. It renders properly at modern resolutions and frame rates, it has a server browser that works, it records demos of every game automatically, it draws a heads-up display you can configure to a ridiculous degree, and it handles the network side better than anything from the nineties could. It is the same game underneath and a considerably better piece of software around it.

The original executable still exists and is a museum piece. Use it once for the feeling and then use the modern client for everything else.

What makes Quake different from what came after

Movement, and item control. Those two things.

The movement is an accident. Quake's physics let you gain speed by turning while strafing, and the technique — strafe jumping, and its cousins circle jumping and bunnyhopping — was never designed. Players found it, id left it in, and every arena shooter since has inherited some version of it. A player who has learned it moves across a map at a speed that looks physically wrong to someone who has not, and there is no shortcut. It is a motor skill and it takes weeks.

Rocket jumping is the same story. Fire a rocket at your own feet, jump at the right moment, and trade health for height. It is how you reach the armour on half the maps in the rotation.

Item control is the strategic half. The powerful pickups — the heavy armours, the quad damage that quadruples your output — respawn on fixed timers. A good duel player knows when each one is due and arranges to be standing there when it appears. That is the actual game. Two experienced players in a duel are not primarily shooting at each other; they are running routes around a map, denying each other resources, and the shooting is what happens when the routes collide.

Watch a high-level duel with that in mind and it stops looking like chaos.

The weapons

Eight of them, and every one has a job.

The axe is a joke and occasionally not. The shotgun is your starting weapon and it is worse than everything else. The super shotgun is a genuinely dangerous close-range weapon and the one you fall back on constantly.

The nailguns fire continuous streams that are excellent for corridors and useless at range. The grenade launcher is for shooting round corners and at feet. The rocket launcher is the weapon the game is balanced around, and most duels are decided by it. The lightning gun does enormous damage in a straight line, drains ammunition frighteningly fast, and kills its own user if fired underwater.

That last detail has ended more matches than anybody would like to admit.

Armour matters as much as weapons and gets discussed half as much. It comes in three grades, the best of them absorbs a large share of incoming damage, and the fights on every duel map are structured around who is standing where when the good armour reappears. A player with full health and no armour is in considerably more trouble than the health bar suggests.

The modes and the maps

Duel is the flagship. One against one, item timing, and a scoreboard that offers you nowhere to hide. It is the mode with the deepest competitive history and the steepest learning curve in the game.

Team deathmatch, usually four a side, is the other pillar. It has its own vocabulary and its own tactics, built around holding a section of the map and controlling the armours in it.

Clan Arena removes the item game entirely. Everybody spawns with everything, there are no pickups, and rounds end when one team is eliminated. It is the friendliest entry point by a wide margin because it removes the part that takes months to learn.

Capture the flag in QuakeWorld came with a grappling hook, which turned it into something much faster and stranger than any other CTF of the period.

The map rotation is narrow and unchanging. dm4 and dm6 are the duel maps everybody knows, dm2 sits alongside them, and aerowalk is the community-built map that became as canonical as anything id shipped. Learning three of these thoroughly is worth more than a passing familiarity with twenty.

Connecting to a server

The client's browser queries the QuakeWorld master servers and lists what is there. It sorts by ping, by players, by map — everything a browser should have done in 1998 and mostly did not.

To join directly, the console takes a connect command with an address, in the way every game descended from this one has since. QuakeWorld does not use the same default port as the Source-engine games elsewhere on this site, so copy the full address with its port rather than assuming anything. This is the single most common reason a direct connection quietly fails.

The hub here is where listings appear as they are verified. For a community this size the choice mostly makes itself — you join whichever one has people on it.

Competitive servers run a standard match mod that handles readying up, agreeing settings and recording the result. Joining one mid-match puts you in spectator until the players are done, which is correct behaviour rather than a fault.

The honest state of it

The population is small and it is concentrated. The centre of gravity has always been in northern Europe, which means the busy hours are European evenings and a player elsewhere will find the list thinner and the pings worse.

It is also, hour for hour, one of the highest-skilled populations in any game you can install. Thirty years of continuous play with no reset and no new-player influx produces exactly what you would expect. Your first fifty games will be one-sided and this is not a reason to stop, because the community is unusually welcoming to people who are visibly trying — a scene that small cannot afford to drive anybody off.

Most coordination happens on Discord now, as it does everywhere. What Discord's changes meant for gaming communities covers how that went for small scenes in particular.

Problems you will actually hit

The client will not start, or complains about missing data. It cannot find pak0.pak and pak1.pak. Copy them where the client expects them.

Your movement feels stuck at walking pace. You have not learned strafe jumping yet. There is no setting for this.

Everything is at 150 ms. Distance. Check where the servers actually are and adjust your expectations, or find the times when your own region is awake. Tick rate explained covers what the numbers are describing.

You get destroyed in every duel. Play Clan Arena for a while instead. It removes item timing from the equation and lets you learn the aiming and the movement separately.

The default field of view is unbearable. Change it. Everybody does.

Where to go next

The rest of the family is all here and all still running. Quake II went in a different direction with a different feel. Quake III Arena stripped out everything except the arena and became the competitive standard for a decade, and Quake Live is its browser-born descendant. Quake 4 is the one people argue about.

Quake's engine also fathered the technology underneath Half-Life, which is why GoldSrc movement feels vaguely familiar if you have played both. And if arena shooters are the appeal rather than Quake specifically, Unreal Tournament is the other answer to the same question and a completely different one.

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JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. Quake servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.